When Charles T. Munger Jr. began hobnobbing with California’s Republican elites two decades ago, he seemed more a political hobbyist than an aspiring power broker — a bow-tied scientist spending down a family fortune on the type of joyless procedural cause favored by nonpartisan reformers.

He dedicated about $14 million to sell Californians on ballot measures to create an independent redistricting commission, which he argued would permanently take the partisan sting out of the state’s politics. Munger then essentially disappeared as a major donor from California politics, his primary task achieved.

But the threat of partisan gerrymandering is back, and so is Munger. In less than a month, he has spent more than $30 million to defeat Proposition 50, a constitutional amendment that would disempower the redistricting commission so that Democrats can impose their favored maps. The 68-year-old Munger today looks a man out of time: a pre-MAGA Republican who may do more than any other American to maintain Donald Trump’s hold on power.

Munger’s commitment to defending the new status quo has made his motives a focal point of the campaign over Prop 50. He is lambasted by California Democrats across the state for being an “anti-choice mega millionaire,” mocked in advertisements as the Jack to Trump’s King in a rigged card game.

“He wears these attacks like a badge of courage,” said Duf Sundheim, who served as chair of the California Republican Party when Munger first emerged as one of its largest donors. “He’s good at processing data, he’s good at processing what’s going on … but I just don’t know how he’s processed all this stuff.”

In November, voters will decide which version of Munger they believe — with the fate of Prop 50 hanging in the balance. Is he truly the quirkily attired avatar for electoral fairness? Or an oligarch perpetuating a world in his image, holding Trump at arm’s length while abetting his schemes to solidify power?

Morality tales

As a child, Munger lived the well-to-do life of a young man blessed by wealth and privilege, attending Los Angeles private schools and taking family ski trips to Sun Valley.

His father, Charles Munger Sr., drew on his success as a real estate attorney and investor to impart wisdom to his children. At the dinner table, the elder Munger would spin his experiences into ethical parables in which a person had to choose between right and wrong. In what Wendy Munger called her father’s “morality tales,” the just and honest path is chosen, and success ultimately follows. In what she called “downward spiral tales,” an unethical choice leads to inevitable catastrophe.

While Charles Munger Jr. was studying physics at Stanford University, his father would make a business choice that stood to transform the family for generations. In 1978, Munger Sr. joined Berkshire Hathaway as vice chair, becoming the right-hand man to his longtime business associate Warren Buffett. In the process, the Munger family went from well-off to fabulously wealthy, holding a significant stake in the rapidly increasing value of the multi-national holding company.

As his father became a major figure in American finance, Munger Jr. was mesmerized by the finer points of high-energy particle physics and atomic systems. Attracted to the intellectual energy of the Bay Area, Munger stayed in the region after his graduation from Stanford to earn a doctorate in physics from University of California, Berkeley in 1987. By the early 1990s he was working as a researcher at Stanford’s Linear Accelerators and, between 2003 and 2007, helped the California State Board of Education develop the state’s high school math and science curriculum as part of a special commission.

Politics were of only glancing interest to Munger, a registered Republican who voted regularly but did little with the growing wealth that his father began transferring to his children throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. That changed in 2005, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special election to propose a set of changes he said would fix California’s broken politics by weakening the grip of unions and Democrats.

The physicist was receptive to one particular systems problem that Schwarzenegger identified. Every decade, after the Census updated population counts, Democrats and Republicans in the state Capitol worked together to develop district maps that protected incumbents. It worked — in 2004, not a single incumbent in California lost their election. In an effort to resolve that failure of competition, Schwarzenegger proposed a measure in 2005, Proposition 77, that would take the mapmaking power from the legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges.

Munger found himself as the protagonist at the start of one his father’s stories — a man facing an ethical problem that he could either turn away from or help resolve. As a physicist, Munger had few weapons with which to arm himself for a campaign. But he could easily give $100,000 to Schwarzenegger’s campaign to pass Prop 77. So he did.

“Governor,” Munger said at a 2013 conference at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, as he recalled reading the pamphlet voters received outlining Schwarzenegger’s argument for Prop 77. “If this is where you want to take my state, you have just got yourself a soldier.”

The measure was rejected by voters, along with the rest of Schwarzenegger’s ballot questions, as voters resisted a proposal that they felt would leave the power to draw political maps in the hands of still untrustworthy sources. But his newest soldier did not walk away from the political arena — and in redistricting Munger had found his cause. “It’s really what he cares about,” said Kevin Spillane, a Republican strategist who first met Munger in 2007. “He’s not spending his money to buy a private island, or get himself a 747. He’s passionate about political reform.”

After striking out on Prop 77, Schwarzenegger returned to the ballot three years later with another attempt to establish independent redistricting for state legislative districts in California. This time, the measure proposed to create a citizen’s redistricting commission, giving the power to draw maps to voters, rather than judges. Munger contributed about $1 million to the effort, his first seven-figure political spend.

It put Munger at the foreground of a coalition that included not just Schwarzenegger and the Republican Party. Venerable good-government groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters highlighted the dysfunction of the California legislature, arguing that “pampered” politicians were failing to deliver results to voters.

This time voters bought it, approving Prop 11 by a two-point margin in November 2008. Emboldened by the success — and what his money could achieve — Munger dove into the political world.

In 2010, he became the chair and co-author of Prop 20, which aimed to expand the power of the independent mapmaking commission to cover U.S. House districts. This time, Munger helped to direct campaign strategy while spending another $13 million on the successful effort.

Those who encountered Munger during this period quickly realized he wasn’t your average rich guy throwing money around to get his way. Political operatives who worked with him to pass redistricting reforms describe Munger as subdued, quiet and somewhat “quirky.” He approached politics with an engineering mindset, identifying a problem and then working step by step to resolve it.

“He sweats the details,” said Zabrae Valentine, who worked to pass Prop 11 with Munger and first met him in 2007. “For big donor types, that’s very unusual.”

Over the course of a half-decade, Munger had become the state’s preeminent good-government philanthropist, and the most avid defender of its merits. He told a Los Angeles Times columnist that he wanted to “uproot the evil” of gerrymandering. He described himself as a “redistricting reform zealot.” When Prop 20 was challenged in court, he defended it vociferously.

Soon, he would look to extend his influence.

Republicans on the beach

In the early 2000s, the annual Lincoln Club of Northern California’s retreats to Pebble Beach were gilded affairs marked by fine dining, influential speakers and polite discourse. A home for moderate Republicans espousing limited government and fiscal responsibility, the group would gather at the iconic golf course near Monterey, nibbling hors d’oeuvres as they discussed their vision for the state beneath fog and cypress trees.

It was this version of the Republican Party — courtly, moderate, pragmatic — where Munger found his political home. After successfully passing redistricting reforms, he backed another pair of ballot efforts, in 2012 spending nearly $40 million in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat a measure that would raise taxes on the wealthy and a measure to weaken labor unions.

He then turned his attention to propping up the languid Republican Party in California in hopes that a more robust opposition would prompt better governance in Sacramento. Munger launched his own Spirit of Democracy committee that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect Republicans to the state legislature, favoring female, Latino and moderate candidates.

He also became a player in federal politics. Munger contributed large sums to the PAC of Rep. Kevin McCarthy once he became House minority leader in 2014. At the same time, the maps he helped enshrine — drawn by professionals charged with working in the public interest rather than either party — helped to strengthen Republican’s House delegation from California, positioning McCarthy for a subsequent rise to speaker.

Spillane told the Los Angeles Times in 2015 that Munger had prevented the state party from being “driven into the sea.”

But in 2017, his major donations stopped. Charlie Munger vanished from California politics.

The case of the missing zillionaire

Until this summer, it seemed Munger would enjoy a quiet retirement from politics, living out his days writing Japanese tanka poetry at his estate on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula.

Then in July, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would embark on a remarkable mid-decade gerrymander of California to combat a similar effort taking place in Texas. At first, few took Newsom’s threats seriously. But Munger did, creating an X account to speak to what was then no more than a few dozen followers.

“Any attempt to undermine the nonpartisan California Redistricting Commission will be strongly opposed in the courts and at the ballot box,” Munger wrote in July.

When Newsom proved he was serious about his redistricting plan, Munger emerged from his estate, ready to defend his signature achievement . He quickly assembled a campaign, recruiting consultants and commissioning polls to determine the contours of a No campaign. He reached out to Schwarzenegger, and donated to the League of Women Voters in an ultimately failed effort to reestablish the coalition he had led in 2008 and 2010.

After spending less than $1 million on political causes over the previous decade, Munger has now dropped $30 million into a No campaign that aims to defeat Prop 50.

Even his side’s advertising has an old-fashioned quality: The most widely disseminated spot from the Protect Voters First campaign shows hand-carved and delicately varnished wooden blocks reading FAIR ELECTIONS being pummeled by a kettlebell.

“If we trade away California’s independent redistricting for a partisan power grab, we kill the cure,” Munger wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “We send a dangerous message to the rest of the country that reform is conditional and principles can be abandoned when they are inconvenient. That is how cynicism spreads, trust in government erodes and citizen voices fade.”

Munger’s high-minded language surrounding fairness and government reform has not changed much since 2008. But the political environment has. Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, erstwhile co-combatants in past fights to end gerrymandering, have kept to the sidelines, marginalized by their own internal conflict and incentivized to remain neutral by California’s Democratic power structure.

Munger, in his op-ed, acknowledged the new partisan split of Prop 50, noting that he faced “two difficult options” in either allowing California to undo his achievements, or fighting Newsom and risk being labeled “a cat’s paw for Republicans seeking to gain House seats.”

That, ultimately, is exactly what happened. In response to Munger’s opposition, Newsom and Democrats have pulled no punches, personally attacking Munger for his past contributions, calling him an “anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ MAGA millionaire,” and plastering his face over attack ads in which he is portrayed as Trump’s henchman.

No one who knows Munger personally believes those statements to be accurate. Universally, former associates describe him as far from the current culture wars that divide the sides in 2025.

“I never heard him utter a word one way or the other about abortion rights or any other matter of social or cultural policy,” said Dan Schnur, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, who first met Munger at those Lincoln Club gatherings.

Those familiar with Munger’s views say it is no coincidence he drifted away from Republican politics just as Trump became the party’s figurehead. Munger, whom one adviser described as a “different kind of Republican,” was ill at ease as the genteel Lincoln Club, Pebble Beach form of conservatism gave way to harsher MAGA bloodsport.

It has separated him from past allies. While McCarthy has organized his own campaign funded largely by committees associated with congressional Republicans, Munger has kept his distance from a man he once helped to become House speaker. Instead, Munger has started his own committee, Protect Voters First, which says it has not coordinated with McCarthy’s group.

Munger’s personal life remains very private, living in Palo Alto with his wife Mandy Lowell. He visits art museums. He listens to folk music. When asked for an interview, Munger opted instead to send a 1,500-word resume highlighting his achievements in particle physics and political reform. (He did not comment for this article.)

So far he seems ill-inclined to fight back against attacks on his character, or efforts to characterize his ideology. But his political journey, from the face of good government reform to the target of ubiquitous attack ads within 10 years, is evidence that the moral code of political combat has shifted.

As in one of the morality tales he heard as a child, Munger faces a choice as to how to respond. The stakes of Prop 50 are clear. But the right ethical path — for voters, for Munger, and for the country — is not.